Quoting Jeff A. Earickson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > Hi, > IMHO, quotas on mail file systems are a bad, bad idea. You don't ever > want to loose email because a file system filled up or a user hit their > quota (something they can't control if they aren't around to check email).
I'll change this to: IMHO, using the system to manage quotas on mail file systems is a bad, bad idea. Qpopper "knows" how much mail you have. stat(3) can tell it. Let QPOPPER handle the quota issue. You might also tweak mail.local to handle quotae on delivery. I'm also a big fan of TMPFAIL on overquota. I can teach sendmail that local mail should try for N days and bounce it after that. I hate the DOS that is being able to fill someones mail and make them bounce all mail after that. There are some bumps: If I have a quota of Q, and I get a message > Q, it will sit in the inbound queue failing to deliver. With a commercial IMAP/POP server I used, there is the option to allow "one message over quota" that's really useful. It let's the user get the powerpoint mail (inevitably) and delete it. Bottom line: Let qpopper and mail.local deal with the quotae. Limit the users who are getting the basic service. Now: disk is cheap. I'm sorry, but if I'm really running a semi-commercial service, disk IS cheap, to a point. I don't have to spend a lot of time selecting disk. There are criteria to ponder, for about a minute. The "playground" box that handles mail for 50 friends? I can go with big and slow. Maybe dual, mirrored. An 7200RPM IDE is around $90 for 60GB. For real mail sites (50k users+), I really want 15,000RPM 9GB drives. I settle for whatever size, but partition it to just use part of the disk. Make a call: "Hi, I need a 10k or 15k drive, 36 or 70GB, please send it over". There's a minute. Managing the data may take more, but ISP's generally get to charge more for "premium" customers that keep more mail. The ISP I work with gives N pop accounts away, but if they want IMAP or huge storage, they charge for it. $10/month/mailbox means another $120 every year. Times 5000 users is $600k. That covers a tape drive and my time. "Dear Favorite Storage Vendor, please send me another high end RAID box that for $30k with the minimum 500GB that you sell" (which can handle 100k users performance and storage wise). It's just basic business.
